A facsimile apparatus may employ a dynamic RAM (DRAM) or a static RAM (SRAM) as a memory for storing information to be sent or received. Such a memory may be employed because the facsimile apparatus first stores the information and then starts communication or recording by using the information. Both DRAM and SRAM have been widely used in facsimile apparatuses although they cannot retain information without a power supply. Recently, flash memories have become employed in facsimile apparatuses as a memory for storing information instead of DRAM or SRAM. This is because a flash memory can retain information without a power supply.
The flash memory has more than one block, and the capacity of each block depends on the memory size, but it is generally a rather large capacity such as 64 KB. The data stored in a flash memory is erasable in a blocks. Thus when a user wants to write new data into the flash memory, which is filled with other data, the user desirably first erases all the stored data before writing the new data. When more than one file is stored in a block, and some of the files are ready to be erased after completing their communication or recording, yet, the other files still await communications or recordings and are not erasable, the block cannot be erased. In other words, it is impossible to simply overwrite an erasable file with a new file. Thus, until all the files of the block complete their communications or recordings, the block is never erased and remains occupied. The operation efficiency of the block is thus reduced, and this may mislead users that the apparatus has malfunctioned, because the memory occupancy rate has not decreased although the communication has ended.